Real World Haskell Update

Times are exciting. Our book, Real World Haskell, is now available in a number of venues. But before I get to that, I’ve got to talk about what a thrill this project has been.

I created our internal Darcs repository in May, 2007. Since then, the three of us has made 1324 commits — and that doesn’t count work done by copyeditors and others at O’Reilly.

We made available early drafts of the book online for commenting, which served as our tech review process. By the time we finished writing the book, about 800 people had submitted over 7,500 comments. I’ve never seen anything like it, and really appreciate all those that commented about it.

I’m now considering taking the same approach with a textbook. I’m writing all my lecture notes for a course on static analysis next semester in LaTeX, and it wouldn’t take much additional effort to post them online to solicit feedback.

Based on your experience, with enough iterations teaching the class and feedback from the community, the notes might “gel” into a nice textbook in a couple years.